Peter Scheer wrote an interesting article awhile back called The Great Firewall, talking about the internet censorship in China. Parts of particular interest to me were what search engine terms were deemed verboten and the types of sites outside of China which get blocked, so I’ll quote those passages below.
A milestone of sorts was passed in the first quarter of this year when China blew past the United States to become the biggest internet market in the world. At 225 million users, and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.
I experienced this first-hand when, about a year ago, I made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing internet search results for searches performed inside China–within the “Great Firewall” of government censorship, as it is called–with the same searches performed from locations outside China (and therefore outside the firewall). The law firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed submitting to Google and Yahoo search terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong”.
Mind you, these were American-trained litigators, the kind of lawyers who barely flinch in the face of a grand jury subpoena, and who spend their careers pushing back against the demands of government authorities. While usually immune to intimidation, they nonetheless feared the repercussions to themselves, their firms, and their clients from the mere act of typing a few search terms into an internet-connected computer. So seductive are the business opportunities in China that the risk of losing them transforms even hardened litigators into wimps.
and the type of sites (which no doubt include this blog) which get blocked…
Websites based outside China, meanwhile, are subject to blocking by the Great Firewall based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government. These include nearly all blogging services, wikipedia and wiki platforms generally (wikileaks included), social networking websites and peer-to-peer technologies of all kinds, including photo-sharing and video-sharing businesses. In other words, the full panoply of internet 2.0 technologies.
Websites commanding vast audiences for user-generated content are seen by authorities as a grave threat. The Chinese government’s worst nightmare, after all, is a lone and anonymous Tibetan uploading to YouTube grainy cellphone videos of rioting police.
What this boils down to IMO, is that there is probably currently little that bloggers like myself can do to pass along to the Chinese the hazards of consumerism from a western perspective. Considering the worldwide environmental impact which China is having as it becomes increasingly consumer oriented, this is indeed unfortunate. Also unfortunate is the lack of potential for the Chinese to share information with each other through blogging and social networking.
